Carers, Care Homes and the British Media

Time to Care

Hannah Grist, Ros Jennings

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9783030357672
• eBook ISBN: 9783030357689
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Social Sciences

This book focuses on the relationship between the media and those who work as paid care assistants in care homes in Britain. It explores this relationship in terms of the contemporary cultural and personal understandings of care work and care homes that have developed as the role has emerged as increasingly socially and economically significant in society. Three strands of analysis are integrated: an examination of the representations of paid care workers in the British media; the experiences of current and former care workers; and the autoethnographic reflections of the authors who have experiences of working as care assistants. The book offers a rich contextual and experiential account of the responsibilities, challenges, and emotions of care work in British society. Grist and Jennings make a case for the need to better value and more accurately represent care work in contemporary media accounts.

© The Author(s) 2020

H. Grist, R. JenningsCarers, Care Homes and the British Mediahttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35768-9_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Hannah Grist¹ and Ros Jennings²

(1)

University of Bristol, Bristol, UK

(2)

Centre for Women, Ageing and Media, University of Gloucestershire, Cheltenham, UK

Hannah Grist (Corresponding author)

Email: [email protected]

Ros Jennings

Email: [email protected]

Abstract

The introduction explores the rationale for this book: to situate the voices of care workers at the centre of research on British care homes. It argues that bringing together media and ageing studies perspectives can challenge representations of care work and care homes. It explores the approach to research design and positions the combination of multiple qualitative methods as an innovative approach to media, ageing and care home studies. The chapter outlines the structure of the book and concludes by highlighting that the way carers and care homes are thought about and represented must urgently evolve if we are to ensure a better quality of care for older people in care homes in Britain and to provide better support for those who ‘do’ care.

Keywords

Care homesCare assistantsMedia representationAutoethnographyTextual analysisQualitative interviewingGender

End Abstract

Introduction

As the ageing¹ population of Britain continues to grow significantly and as an increasing proportion of those people become reliant on formalised care, the way care and paid caregivers are represented on screen and thought about in everyday life will continue to be both contentious and important. Whilst the care home sector is worth around £15.9 billion a year to the British economy (CMA 2017, online) current cultural narratives continue to position the ageing population as an apocalyptic demographic (Robertson 1990) and a grey tsunami (Barusch 2013; Chivers 2013) resulting in a net drain on resources.

Critiques of neoliberal ageist ideologies like these (Gullette 2004, 2017; Cruikshank 2009; Sandberg and Marshall 2017) highlight the ways that representations of the ‘old-old’ (Byetheway 1995) or fourth age (Gilleard and Higgs 2013) drive narratives of a fear of ageing. Those who have been classified as the fourth age (frail and dependent older people) are constructed as an anathema to the progress narratives of neoliberal individualism characteristic of the third age (Katz and Calasanti 2014; Katz and Marshall 2003). Narratives that have produced concepts of successful and active ageing (Rowe and Kahn 1998) are dominant in most western societies. From this perspective, those who do not maintain individual autonomy to the end of their lives have failed and as a result (in Britain especially) are hidden away from public view in care homes. Their very invisibility act as hauntings that teach us to fear growing old and to hide practices of care from society in general. As Sally Chivers and Ulla Kriebernegg argue in their important work Care Home Stories (2017) ‘institutional care for seniors offers a cultural repository for fears and hopes about an ageing population’ (18).

Whilst debates have long continued around what has become termed the ‘media effects theory’ (cf. Potter 2012) in this book we argue that the way in which groups are represented in popular media formats impacts upon the way audiences understand and make sense of them. Dominant hegemonic media messages are decoded by audiences (cf. Hall 1980), and as we argue in Chap. 3, we believe messages about care work and care homes perform a vital source of cultural memory work (Zelizer, 2008; Zelizer and Tenenboim-Weinblatt 2014)—they provide a reservoir of cultural constructions about what sorts of people carers are. When care homes are visible on screen and in print their depictions as, at best, a badly run hotel staffed by ineffectual fools or, at worst, a ruthlessly run prison camp staffed by sadistic caretakers fuels the popular cultural imagination. These depictions undermine and undervalue the work done by real carers in real homes. This short book brings together the voices of current and former carers who are usually underrepresented in research (Chivers and Kriebernegg 2017, 28) to critique some of these representations, adding to the growing body of research that examines the experiences of working or growing old in a care home.

There exists a large body of literature on the care home, broadly western in origin. Ethnographic accounts of (particularly American) care homes offer detailed insights into daily life for residents (cf. Gubrium 1975; Diamond 1986; Henderson and Vesperi 1995; Stafford 2003; DeForge et al. 2011). Health care and nursing studies approach care home residents from medical perspectives, paying close attention to those living with conditions such as dementia (cf. Fossey et al. 2006; Waite et al. 2009; Downs 2014), and handbooks offer clinical guidance to nursing staff on topics from continence care to medication administration (cf. Nazarko 2002). Scholarship about the care home also takes the form of training manuals and best practice guides aimed at care workers and nurses (cf. Goode and Booth 2012; Morley et al. 2013; Mulley et al. 2014; Rawles 2017) designed to aid the professional development of those who work within care facilities. Guidebooks targeted at families faced with the task of choosing a long-term care facility for relatives also form a substantial contribution to the literature on care work (cf. Goudge 2004; Hurtley and Burton-Jones 2008; Dalley 2014). Significantly there also exists a growing body of literature written by family members with loved ones who have lived and died in substandard care homes (cf. Lawrence 2017), accounts which seek to expose poor practice, challenge policy and share ‘lessons learned’ with families in similar positions. Research into care also includes political and feminist perspectives (cf. Tronto 1994; Twigg 2004; Dahl 2017), and a body of literature exists which examines the care home applying economic and organisational lenses (cf. Reynolds et al. 2003; Hafford-Letchfield 2011; Palmer 2016), adding business studies perspectives to the care home research canon.

Taken together this body of work offers much to our understanding of what care homes are, how they operate and how the people who live within their walls and their families feel about them. It is right and important that the voices of those who experience the care home as recipients of care are central to work ‘on’ or ‘about’ the institution, and it is critical to view the care home refracted through various disciplinary lenses. Whilst the experiences of care assistants form sources of data for many of these studies, few situate carers’ voices at the centre of the research. Fewer still seek to augment the narrative voices of current and former care assistants with autoethnographic reflection and detailed textual analysis of media representations. This book acts as a small contribution to address the gap that exists in scholarship.

This book draws upon the findings of interviews with a small sample of current and former care assistants drawn from care homes in South Wales and the north and south-west of England, coupled with an analysis of the experiences of the authors through autoethnography, and explores popular media representations of care homes and care assistants which aired during the period within the scope of this study (1989–2019). In keeping with the experiential, lived approach that is privileged in this book, the texts chosen for analysis in this book are those which the authors and participants remembered as being particularly conscious of during the times and spaces in which they performed care work. Bringing together these research methods, this book explores the many ways in which age and caregiving are problematized, represented and performed within Britain. It integrates ageing and media studies approaches in order to critically interrogate experiences and representations of paid caregiving and the role that media plays in shaping those British cultural understandings, privileging the perspectives of care workers throughout.

Why Care Homes?

In the substantial literature on caregiving outlined above (whilst by no means an exhaustive review) the terms nursing home, retirement home and, less frequently, ‘old peoples’ home are frequently mentioned. Following Froggatt et al. (2009) in their significant work Understanding Care Homes: A Research and Development Perspective we use the term ‘care home’ to refer to ‘institutional care settings that provide long-term care for people with ongoin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Autoethnographies of Care
• 3. Little More Than Fools and Monsters: Care Workers in the UK Media
• 4. Conversations with Carers
• 5. Concluding Thoughts
• Back Matter